Equations: Dialectic Form (2021)

#45
How Trish and I most go up is through words. Sometimes when we talk
(often late at night, and when our bodies have spent themselves) we reach
an elevated state of understanding; a sense of having transcended the
shackles of normal consciousness. This is true intoxication, and cuts into
us more (and with greater rapidity, satisfaction) than drugs do. We read
through Donne’s “The Ecstasy” and then bear it out in performative
terms— eyes interlocked, extremities touching. We are both classicists and
the notion of aligning ourselves with age-old wisdom arouses us. In our
shared mythology, the American landscape does not exist— we do our
dances with and obeisance to Albion, and our purer roots attach us to
English thoughts, objects, senses of art’s victory over materiality, war, and
history. Trish has other dwelling spots— Renaissance Italy fascinates her.
The humanism she espouses is Renaissance humanism; the nobility and
expressiveness of the human form, its many contours and lights. As the
years wear on, I realize that Trish is stuck in the mode of replication. She
wants to compress the Renaissance into the twenty-first century. I leave
the nineteenth century behind and initiate a quest for a contemporary
muse, one that integrates rather than replicates. But our shared voyage
through four or five centuries of high art is our greatest and most lasting
shared accomplishment.
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